Oak Island Season 13 Finale: New Shocking Details Change Everything We Thought We Knew

THE WATER’S SQUIRTING UP from the bottom. You’ll see it in the back corner.
>> Oh, yeah.
>> Do we know if it’s fresh or salt?
>> I know.
>> A sealed chamber has been discovered beneath the shoreline of Oak Island.
When Rick Lagginina and the excavation crew breached the walls, they found the interior completely dry. A time capsule preserved for centuries. Carbon dating on timber samples recovered from inside places construction between 1350 and400 AD, making this the oldest confirmed man-made structure ever found in Nova Scotia. If the artifacts inside match the medieval origin of the chamber itself, Oak Island just became a billiondoll archaeological site. And here’s what changes everything we thought we knew. The money pit was never the vault. It was the lock. For 229 years, searchers have been trying to pick that lock, drilling down, flooding out, losing lives and fortunes in the process. Six men dead, countless fortunes destroyed.
>> There’s the famous Oak Island legend.
Six people have died. Then a seventh has to die. In search of the In search of the treasure, and that’s when all will be revealed.
>> Generation after generation, convinced they were just one dig away from the truth. But the real secret wasn’t buried at the bottom of a flooded shaft. It was hidden sideways beneath the shoreline in a place nobody thought to look.
>> All our focus for well for almost 10 years has been away from this area. Now things are pointing us in that direction.
>> There’s different opinions on what shaft that shaft is over the years.
>> It’s been called 12. It’s been called 17. scientific dating on the wood that come out of it has said that perhaps it’s earlier than the start of the hunt.
>> The season 13 finale will reveal what Rick Lagginina, Marty Lagginina, and their crew found when they opened a door that had been sealed for over 600 years.
This isn’t another tease. This isn’t another tune in next week cliffhanger.
The evidence recovered this season fundamentally changes the Oak Island story. And by the end of this video, the entire mystery will look completely different from the chamber beneath the shore. The discovery happened during the filming of the episode titled Billion Dollar Clues.
Gary Drayton was working the shoreline with his metal detector when he got a signal that didn’t make sense. Not the sharp ping of a coin or the dull thud of iron. Something deeper, more resonant.
>> You can look at old doors and chests and you see rose head spikes. all the time.
Will it connect uh in some way to the efforts done long ago in the money pit in Smith’s Cove?
That’s the hope.
>> After decades of treasure hunting across four continents, Gary Drayton knows what different materials sound like underground. This signal was wrong. It suggested a void where there shouldn’t be one. When the excavation crew brought in equipment to investigate, they struck timber. The sound that came back was unmistakable. a hollow resonant boom that echoed like a drum. Wood doesn’t make that sound unless there’s empty space behind it. Gary Drayton froze, his detector still in hand. In all his years on Oak Island, he had never heard anything like it. Rick Lagginina was standing at the edge of the dig when the hollow strike registered. His face went pale. After 13 seasons of near misses and false leads, after watching his brother pour millions into this island, after enduring the skeptics and the doubters and the endless questions about whether any of it was worth it, he knew exactly what that sound meant. Something was down there, something hollow, something built.
>> I don’t think any of us want to quit on this attempt to find whatever we can in the spoils, but I think there’s more to be found. It’s exciting. The money pits oils piles are huge because they accumulate. There could be anything in them. The hope is that we will find some serious clues associated with the treasure in the money area.
>> The anomalies detected in the area had puzzled geologists for weeks. Rock formations don’t create hollow cavities like that. Water erosion doesn’t produce that kind of void. When the crew dug deeper, they discovered the truth. Those anomalies weren’t geological formations.
They were walls, constructed walls, deliberately built, positioned at a depth that protected them from the rising and falling tides. This is engineering that requires advanced knowledge of hydraulics, soil mechanics, and architectural planning. Knowledge that pirates in the 1700s simply didn’t possess. Whoever built this chamber understood how water moves through soil.
They understood pressure differentials.
They understood how to create a seal that would hold for centuries. This wasn’t a hole dug in haste by buccaneers looking to stash their plunder. This was planned, calculated, executed with precision that speaks to years of preparation and generations of accumulated knowledge. When the breach finally opened, the excavation crew braced for the rush of seawater that had destroyed every previous dig on the island. It never came. the seal held.
And when the first air escaped from inside, it carried the unmistakable smell of ancient wood and stale earth.
The scent of a space that hadn’t been opened in centuries. There was something else in that air, too. A mustiness that spoke of great age, of timbers that had been cut when medieval kings still ruled Europe. The walls of the chamber, visible in the dim light, showed the marks of hand tools. Not the clean cuts of modern machinery, but the deliberate strokes of craftsmen who measured their work in seasons, not hours.
>> We’ve encountered what we deem to be potential offset chambers or voids in the ground. So, we’re starting to collect some data for you guys.
>> Marty Lagginina arrived at the site within the hour. He stood at the edge of the opening, staring into the darkness, and said nothing for a long moment. then quietly, “This is it. This is what we’ve been looking for.” The chamber explains something that has puzzled researchers for generations. The flood tunnels in the Money Pit were never just traps.
They were part of an intricate hydraulic system designed to redirect water away from this hidden room. The engineering wasn’t meant to fill the money pit. It was meant to protect what lay beneath the shoreline. Every searcher tunnel, every collapsed shaft, every flooded excavation for the past two centuries was aimed at the wrong target. The real vault was here all along. The pressure down there is immense. Tons of wet earth and ocean water pressing against timber that has been slowly rotting for centuries. The risk of catastrophic collapse is higher than ever. One wrong move, one miscalculation, and everything inside could be crushed or flooded before anyone documents what’s there.
Rick Lagginina understands this better than anyone. Standing at the edge of the brereech, he faced a choice that defines season 13. Proceed carefully and risk losing the window of opportunity or push forward aggressively and risk destroying the very thing they came to find. He chose to proceed.
The collapse. But reaching the chamber came at a cost. The money pit fought back. For season 13, the strategy was aggressive. Massive equipment, expanded excavation zones, a determined push to finally drain the central dig site.
>> Somebody says, “On your property, there’s gold right here. Drill right here.” And you think, “Yeah, why not?
Why not drill a hole right here?” But then we can’t just drill a hole wherever somebody thinks it is. So, we have to do a little more diligence on this technology. And we intend to.
>> Rick and Marty Lagginina committed everything to this effort. Millions of dollars, years of planning, the weight of 13 seasons of expectations. The ground gave way without warning. A hollow space deep below collapsed, triggering a chain reaction that shifted the entire surface above. Heavy machinery tilted toward the void. Men scrambled to safety, shouting warnings to each other across the chaos. The shock waves sent vibrations across the entire island, clouding the water in every shaft and corrupting data from nearby excavations. Dust rose in a column that could be seen from the causeway. The sound was something none of them would forget. A deep grinding roar as tons of earth shifted and settled. Then silence. The kind of silence that follows disaster when everyone is counting heads and checking to make sure no one went down with the collapse. Gary Drayton was working a peripheral sight when the collapse happened. He felt the ground shutter beneath his boots and watched a cloud of dust rise from the money pit area.
That’s not good, he said, already moving toward the evacuation point. That’s not good at all. The collapse forced an immediate evacuation. Production shut down. Safety assessments began. For several days, no one was permitted near the money pit. The area was cordoned off, deemed too unstable for any human presence. The conditions on Oak Island have become so unstable that local authorities intervened with stopwork orders. The limestone and gypsum layers beneath the surface are slowly dissolving. A process that’s been happening for thousands of years. Every drill bit, every shaft, every excavation accelerates that dissolution. The island is falling apart. New ratings data shows viewership up 15% this season. People are drawn to the danger, watching from the safety of their living rooms as men risk everything on unstable ground. But for Rick Lagginina, Marty Lagginina, and the rest of the crew actually working the site, the danger isn’t entertainment. It’s a daily reality that has become increasingly difficult to manage. A collapse at 100 ft deep is no small thing. The shock wave radiates outward, destabilizing adjacent shafts, contaminating water samples, corrupting months of careful excavation data.
>> Stop.
It’s caving. It’s caving all the way back. What took years to build can be destroyed in seconds. But here’s the twist no one expected. When the ground shifted, it exposed a debris layer that had never been documented. Timber samples were recovered from the chaos.
Wood that doesn’t match the searcher tunnels from the 1800s. Wood with handcarved marks that date to the medieval period. The collapse destroyed evidence. But it also revealed a secret that had been hidden for 600 years.
The medieval connection. The artifacts recovered from season 13 aren’t from the age of pirates. They’re medieval. Carbon dating places human activity on Oak Island between 1350 and 1400 AD, centuries before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. This discovery forces a confrontation with a difficult question.
Have searchers been looking in the wrong spot for over a decade? If the real story was hiding in lot 5 and beneath the shoreline while everyone focused on the money pit, then years of work, millions of dollars, countless man-hour, six lost lives were spent chasing a deliberate misdirection. The implications extend far beyond Oak Island itself. If Europeans were building sophisticated underground structures in Nova Scotia in the 1300s, then the entire history of transatlantic contact needs to be rewritten. The Vikings reached North America around 1,000 AD. That much is accepted. But the Viking settlements were temporary, abandoned within a few years. What the season 13 evidence suggests is something different. A planned expedition with the resources and knowledge to construct permanent hidden infrastructure. Tools recovered from LA BC 5 match designs used in medieval France and Scotland.
The kind of tools used to construct castles, cathedrals, and fortifications.
Building tools, not searcher tools.
Implements designed for construction on a massive scale.
>> It’s a pickaxe.
That is really cool. This is what I was hoping for. An old tool.
>> Yeah. Broken a long time ago. No recent break. Look at the shape, mate. It’s broken here. This ain’t no heavy duty pickaxe. This is a tunneling pick. Yes, it is. And look at how short it is.
>> Rick Lagginina held one of the recovered wood fragments in his hands, running his fingers across the surface. The ads marks were unmistakable. Shallow curved grooves left by a tool that hasn’t been used in 500 years. The wood felt dense and heavy, saturated with centuries of moisture, but still intact. Each groove told a story of the craftsman who made it. The angle of the swing, the pressure applied, the deliberate care of someone who understood that this work would need to last. “This isn’t search or debris,” Rick said, turning the fragment over in his hands. “This is original. This is from the builders.” He passed the wood to the archaeologist standing beside him. The room went quiet as everyone processed what they were looking at.
physical evidence of medieval construction recovered from beneath the soil of Nova Scotia. Evidence that shouldn’t exist if the history books are correct. The implications are staggering. Europeans were on Oak Island 300 years before the Money Pit was supposedly discovered in 1795.
Every history textbook taught in schools is wrong. The theory that now dominates the investigation suggests the treasure was never gold or jewels. It was a secure storage site for an organization that was being hunted, a place to hide documents, artifacts, or objects of immense religious significance. The Knights Templar. The Templar connection has circulated for years, usually dismissed as speculation based on a cross carved into stone or a symbol that might be coincidental. This time, the evidence is physical, datable, verifiable. The Templars weren’t pirates. They were engineers and architects, builders of some of the most sophisticated structures in medieval Europe. Cathedrals that still stand today. Fortresses that have survived 800 years of warfare and weather. They understood hydraulics, soil, mechanics, and large-scale construction in ways that no pirate crew ever could. The flood tunnels suddenly make sense.
Pirates didn’t have the engineering knowledge to build a hydraulic trap that works with ocean tides. that requires mathematics, physics, and an understanding of pressure that comes from generations of accumulated knowledge. A monastic military order with centuries of building experience possessed exactly these skills. Marty Lagginina sat in the war room staring at the lab report confirming the carbon dates. The wood recovered from beneath the shoreline predates Columbus by 150 years. The numbers on the page represented more than a scientific finding. They represented vindication, years of investment, years of doubt, years of people asking why two successful businessmen would pour their fortunes into a hole in the ground.
>> It lacks any modern alloying element like manganesees or any other element I would normally find which indicate older.
>> Brilliant.
>> We’re not treasure hunters anymore, Marty said, setting the report down on the table. We’re archaeologists and we just found proof that changes history.
Rick stood at the window looking out at the island that had consumed so much of their lives. Neither brother spoke for a long moment. They didn’t need to. The weight of the discovery filled the silence. The finale will showcase these artifacts in a dramatic reveal. The ads marked timber, the medieval tools, the carbon dating results that place construction in the 1300s. After 13 seasons of speculation, Oak Island finally has physical evidence of its true origin. But that evidence raises an uncomfortable question. If something was deliberately hidden here, if powerful people went to extraordinary lengths to ensure it would never be found, perhaps there was a reason it was meant to stay buried.
The seventh death. The legend has haunted Oak Island since the beginning.
Seven must die before the treasure is found. Six men have already lost their lives searching for the island’s secrets. The season 13 finale comes closer to adding a seventh than any moment in the show’s history. The Curse has always felt like television drama, a hook to keep viewers engaged, a narrative device to raise stakes. But standing at the edge of a collapsing pit, watching heavy machinery slide toward oblivion, the men on Oak Island don’t experience the curse as entertainment. They experience it as a very real possibility that today might be the day the legend completes itself.
The collapse wasn’t just a setback. It was a near disaster that genuinely frightened everyone on site. In the final days of filming, a piece of heavy equipment nearly slid into a void that opened without warning. Men were within feet of the edge when the ground began to give way. Seconds separated survival from catastrophe. Rick Lagginina stood at the perimeter after the evacuation, watching the dust settle over the money pit. His expression carried something that looked less like frustration and more like grief. 13 years of his life buried in that hole, and the hole was trying to bury him back. The footage from the finale carries a somber weight.
No celebrations, no champagne, just exhausted men sitting in the war room processing what almost happened. The relief on their faces tells the story better than narration ever could. They found something extraordinary, but they were also reminded in the most visceral way possible, that the island isn’t finished with them. The boldest theory now circulating involves a strip mine solution. The tunnels are too dangerous.
The shafts keep collapsing. Precise drilling tactics have failed for 13 seasons. The only path forward may be removing the danger entirely. a massive open pit operation that exposes everything to sunlight and settles the mystery once and for all. Fans have argued for years that the Lagginina brothers should take the Tony Beat approach. Just move the entire mountain, clear away the soil, expose everything.
After this season’s collapse, that nuclear option no longer seems extreme.
It seems necessary, but that decision carries weight. Dig up the island and there’s no going back. The archaeological context would be destroyed. the mystery would end one way or another. The season 13 finale presents Rick and Marty Lagginina with an impossible choice. Shut down the excavation because the risk has become too great or push harder and rip the island apart searching for answers that may have been buried for a very good reason.
What the finale reveals, season 13 was never really about treasure. It was about the moment when the search became something else entirely. The discovery of the shore chamber, the medieval timber, the carbon dating that places construction in the 1300s. These aren’t clues leading to a chest of gold.
They’re evidence of a hidden chapter in history, a secret that someone went to extraordinary lengths to protect.
>> This is definitively not modern.
So, we would comfortably put it in the 1700s.
>> Sweet.
>> Yeah. And it could potentially be older.
>> This completely changes the narrative of the series. It shifts attention from a straight down dig to a sideways mystery.
It connects the swamp, the shoreline, and the pit in ways nobody anticipated.
And it suggests the builders had a plan far more sophisticated than simply hiding a box. They were constructing an underground stronghold, a secure facility designed to protect something for centuries, something so valuable or so dangerous that it justified crossing an ocean to hide it in the most remote location they could find. on Oak Island may have started with Templars and then some of these participants were actually endeavored to keep it hidden for later generations to come back and find it. So there is now an imperative to try to understand uh the possibility of the Knights of Malta having something to do with the work done on Oak Island. The money pit was designed to fail. Every searcher who drilled down, who flooded out, who lost their fortune and sometimes their life, they were following a trail that was meant to lead nowhere. The real vault was hidden in plain sight beneath the shore, sealed away from the tides that destroyed everything else. Gary Drayton summed it up best, standing at the edge of the chamber opening as the sun set over Oak Island. 200 years of digging in the wrong bloody spot and the answer was right here the whole time. The finale won’t provide all the answers. It never does. But it will reveal enough to change the fundamental question. The mystery is no longer where is the treasure. The mystery is now what was so dangerous that medieval builders crossed an ocean to hide it and designed a trap that has killed six men trying to find it.
Season 13 brought the team closer to that answer than anyone has come in two centuries. And the finale will show just how close they got and what it nearly cost them. The seventh death has not yet come. But on Oak Island, the curse is patient.